This piece from Bon Appetit reads more like a parody of the emoted eating habits of the chattering class than a serious guide to getting your children more involved in the kitchen:

We started our kids on organic pureed butternut squash baby food and now they’re chopping summer squash for succotash with a butter knife. They started by eating string cheese and they’re now savoring Stilton. We avoided ancho chiles, but they unexpectedly taught us that they love anchovies. The moral of the story is: don’t cook down to your kids. Cook with them.

The writer is trying a little hard for alliteration (pun intended). This is from Rule 1, “Feed Them Perfect Produce”

Buy the best, ripe, in-season, local produce you can find, whether at a grocery store or farmer’s market. Asparagus in spring to teach your kids the essential less [sic] of eating seasonally and locally. Strawberries in summer. Apples in fall. Citrus in winter. Perfection. Perfection. Perfection.

Here’s more from Rule 6, “Be Honest’”

Chicken is from a bird. Beef is from a cow. Pork is from a pig. Tell your kids the truth about animals and they can make their own choices about what they’re comfortable eating (old Macdonald [sic] had a farm and he had an oink oink for bacon; remember that one?). Our 7 year old omnivore Violet knows the deal and has come to the decision that she doesn’t like the deal, but she still hasn’t given up good old cured meat like bacon or prosciutto. It’s too yummy for now. We’ve taught her about the difference between happily raised animals and sadly raised factory farm ones, but her heart’s just not into the carnivore thing right now.

In a perfect world, all parents would engage their children about food in this manner… after the au pair has read them this week’s chapter from The Omnivore’s Dilemma and before the whole family kneels and begs Gaia to absolve them of their exhalations.

I picture the writer of this article to be like these people. Instead of tasting the American classics, this guy’s poor kids are probably stupefying their classmates with tales of their carbon neutral camping trip to the living room where they ate organic tofu links served in oat-crusted artisan buns, accompanied by fingerling potato straws with roasted garlic aioli dipping sauce. Perfection. Perfection. Perfection.

First it was “food as fashion” and now it’s “eating as a life choice.” Give me a break. I have one rule when it comes to food: If it tastes good, I eat it. Naturally, many factors affect how much of anything I eat, but I don’t look down my nose at the staples of average American cuisine. Just as you don’t have to hate chocolate to prove how much you like vanilla, you don’t have to knock easily attainable food to prove that you have the time and determination to shop around for the freshest stuff.

One problem with this new “local, organic and in season” fad (and it is a fad) is that it places an unearned premium on locally-grown foods, thereby depressurizing the price war that keeps food relatively cheap for all. That means everyone can and will start charging more for the food they produce simply because the median price has shifted. This creates an indirect, regressive tax on the poor, who are often the same people selling backyard crops for extra money at the farmers market in the first place. What’s worse, it rewards the less-efficient organic growing methods over the more productive ones, meaning that the local fields will yield fewer crops each season, thereby resulting in less revenue for said farmers. It I know, I know, it’s a vicious cycle.

All of that is fine and dandy while eating “local, organic and in season” is in vogue, as the premium will probably offset the cut in production. But all of that will vanish when the chattering class moves on to the next fashion in food. And it really is all about fashion. Remember Asian fusion? How many restaurants followed that fashion into existence and closed when the fashion evolved? Just like clothing, music and modern art, the elite define themselves by their early adoptions and quick dismissals of rising trends. Erudite eaters used to sing the praises of ‘smashed’ potatoes until the dish became ubiquitous. Now they’ve moved on to authentic Oaxacan mole.

It seems that posh is out and peasant is in. It’s the culinary equivalent of slumming. And just like with slumming, the experience is as much about discovering and adoring alien things as it is about having people see you discover and adore alien things. When the shock value wears off, so does the adoration.

Next year, after some New York City bistro starts buying exotic grains that are flown in weekly from a small village in India, people will stop talking about the carbon footprints of their ingredients and start gossiping about how you can get fresh asparagus from any farmers market, but you can only get man-eating tiger rice in the East Village. So they don’t look like total hypocrites, some of the proceeds from the rice sales will undoubtedly go to raise “awareness” for whatever grievance is popular at the moment. The fashion will have evolved from eating as a life choice to eating as empathy. Solidarity sauces will become as prevalent in elite circles as the keffiyeh. Then the fashion will evolve again, and all the trend chasers will reshuffle their morality once again in the desperate attempt to appear to have adopted the new cool before it was cool.

Look, I’m all for shopping at the farmers market, making really good food, and building a more sophisticated pallet, but people shouldn’t feel the need to put on airs about it. Eating seasonal is not exactly “essential,” and little kids shouldn’t be forced to visualize a writhing Rhode Island Red (see what I did there with the alliteration?) to justify eating some McNuggets chicken mole.

Erudite eaters need to remember that even though Julia Child helped us Americans learn how to cook elegant French cuisine, it was Clarence Birdseye who gave us the ingredients. I think a little respect is in order. And if these pretentious “foodies” have difficulty mustering any respect, I’ll be satisfied with just a little perspective.